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China’s exports grew last month but at a slower pace than in recent months, the country’s customs agency said Monday. Exports reached $321.8 billion in August, a 4.4% increase compared to the same month last year. That was down from a 7.2% jump in July. Meanwhile, imports totaled $219.5 billion, a 1.8% rise. China’s large trade surplus has become a contentious issue with major trading partners including the U.S. and the European Union. Low-priced Chinese imports are a boon for consumers but can lead to job cuts in manufacturing. In the first eight months of the year, China’s exported $785.3 billion more in goods than it imported from other countries, the monthly customs data showed. President Donald Trump has imposed 30% in additional tariffs on imports from China since taking office early this year. He backed down from even higher tariffs after China retaliated with import taxes of its own. The two countries are in talks to try to reach a trade agreement. The tariffs from both sides and the possibility they could be raised again are having an impact on two-way trade. Chinese exports to the U.S. plunged 33% in August to $47.3 billion, while its imports from the U.S. dropped 16% to $13.4 billion. Exports to the EU rose 10.4% to $46.8 billion, while imports from the 27-member bloc edged down slightly to $22.8 billion. Overall, China’s exports grew at the slowest pace since the January-February period, when they rose just 2.3%. The first two months of the year are reported together to smooth out distortions from the long Lunar New Year break. China’s exports of rare earths rose on a monthly basis to $55 million in August, up from $41 million in July, but down 25.6% compared to the same month last year. Rare earth magnets, which can withstand high heat, are vital to many products including washing machines, cars and fighter jets. China dominates the global market for processing rare earths, and a clampdown on their export in April temporarily halted production at some factories in Europe and the U.S. and raised fears of shutdowns at others. The issue became a focal point of a round of U.S.-China trade talks in London in June. China agreed to approve more export permits for rare earths in return for the U.S. lifting curbs on the sale of chip design software and jet engines to China. ___ This story has been corrected to say China’s January-August trade surplus of $785.3 billion was in goods only, not in goods and services. Ken Moritsugu, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
Armen Kirakosian remembers the frustrations of his first job as a call center agent nearly 10 years ago: the aggravated customers, the constant searching through menus for information and the notes he had to physically write for each call he handled.Thanks to artificial intelligence, the 29-year-old from Athens, Greece, is no longer writing notes or clicking on countless menus. He often has full customer profiles in front of him when a person calls in and may already know what problem the customer has before even saying “hello.” He can spend more time actually serving the customer.“A.I. has taken (the) robot out of us,” Kirakosian said.Roughly 3 million Americans work in call center jobs, and millions more work in call centers around the world, answering billions of inquiries a year about everything from broken iPhones to orders for shoes. Kirakosian works for TTEC, a company that provides third party customer service lines in 22 countries to companies in industries such as autos and banking that need extra capacity or have outsourced their call center operations.Answering these calls can be thankless work. Roughly half of all customer service agents leave the job after a year, according to McKinsey, with stress and monotonous work being among the reasons employees quit.Much of what these agents deal with is referred to in the industry as “break/fix,” which means something is broken or wrong or confusing and the customer expects the person on the phone to fix the problem. Now, it’s a question of who will be tasked with the fix: a human, a computer, or a human augmented by a computer.Already, AI agents have taken over more routine call center tasks. Some jobs have been lost and there have been dire forecasts about the future job market for these individuals, ranging from modest single-percentage point losses, to as many as half of all call center jobs going away in the next decade. The drop likely won’t match the more dire predictions, however, because it’s become evident that the industry will still need humans, perhaps with even higher levels of learning and training, as some customer service issues become increasingly harder to solve.Some finance companies have already experimented with going in heavily with AI for their customer service issues.Klarna, the Swedish buy now, pay later company, replaced 700 of their roughly 3,000 customer service agents with chatbots and AI in 2024. The results were mixed. While the company did save money, Klarna found there was still a need for higher skilled human agents in certain circumstances, such as complicated issues related to identity theft. Earlier this year, Klarna hired seven internal freelancers to handle these issues.Earlier this year, Klarna hired a handful of customer service employees back to the firm, acknowledging there were certain issues that AI couldn’t handle as well as a real person, like identity theft.“Our vision of an AI-first contact center, where AI agents handle the majority of conversations and fewer, better trained and better paid human agents support only the most complex tasks, is quickly becoming a reality,” said Gadi Shamia of Replicant, an AI-software company that trains chatbots to sound more human, in an interview with consultants at McKinsey.The call center customer’s experience, while improved, is still far from perfect.The initial customer service call has long been handled through interactive voice response systems, known in the industry as IVR. Customers interact with IVR when they’re told “press one for sales, press two for support, press five for billing.” These crude systems got an update in the 2010s, when customers could prompt the system by saying “sales” or “support” or simple phrases like “I’d like to pay a bill” instead of navigating through a labyrinthian set of menu options.But customers have little patience for these menus, leading them to “zero out,” which is call center slang for when a customer hits the zero button on their their keypad in hopes of reaching a human. It’s also not uncommon that after a customer “zeros out” they will be put on hold and transferred because they did not end up in the right place for their request.Aware of Americans’ collective impatience with IVR, Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Republican Jim Justice of West Virginia have introduced the “Keep Call Centers in America Act,” which would require clear ways to reach a human agent, and provide incentives to companies that keep call center jobs in the U.S.Companies are trying to roll out telephone systems that broadly understand customer service requests and predict where to send a customer without navigating a menu. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is coming out with its “ChatGPT Agent” service for users that’s able to understand phrases like “I need to find a hotel for a wedding next year, please give me options for clothing and gifts.”Bank of America says it has had increasing success in integrating such features into “Erica,” its chatbot that debuted in 2018. When Erica cannot handle a request, the agent transfers the customer directly to the right department. Erica is now also predictive and analytical, and knows for instance that a customer may repeatedly have a low balance and may need better help budgeting or may have multiple subscriptions to the same service.Bank of America said this month that Erica has been used 3 billion times since its creation and is increasingly taking on a higher case load of customer service requests. The chatbot’s moniker comes from the last five letters of the company’s name.James Bednar, vice president of product and innovation at TTEC, has spent much of his career trying to make customer service calls less painful for the caller as well as the company. He said these tools could eventually kill off IVR for good, ending the need for anyone to “zero out.”“We’re getting to the point where AI will get you to the right person for your problem without you having to route through those menus,” Bednar said. Ken Sweet, AP Business Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
StubHub Holdings, the secondary ticketing marketplace, just threw its hat back in the ring to list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) after postponing its initial public offering (IPO) plans earlier this year. According to a September 8 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company is now eyeing a valuation of around $9 billion. In the filing, StubHub reported that it plans to offer just over 34 million shares of Class A stock for an estimated price of between $22 and $25 per share. If approved, the company will join the NYSE under the ticker symbol STUB. No listing date was shared in the filing, but according to a source familiar with the company, it could come as early as next week. StubHub has been eyeing a solid IPO date for months. The company paused its initial IPO plans in early July amid uncertainties around tariffs and a cooling IPO market, according to media reports. However, in the wake of exciting recent listings from companies such as Figma, Bullish, and others, investor interest in IPOs is back upand StubHub is giving it another go. Why investors want StubHub to go public StubHub was created in 2000 after founder and CEO Eric Baker faced a very particular problem: He was unable to purchase tickets to a sold-out showing of The Lion King on Broadway. The box office was a dead end, and he had no idea who to call for help, the SEC filing recalls in a section on the companys history. Should he canvas the streets around Times Square and hope to find someone with a tickets for sale sign? With no clear answers, he found himself at the mercy of an opaque market. To solve this problem, Baker founded StubHub at a time when secondary ticketing existed only as a fragmented offline market. Today, StubHub believes that it operates the largest global secondary ticketing market for live events, selling over 40 million tickets to buyers in more than 200 countries in 2024. After merging with the rival ticketing platform viagogo (also founded by Baker) in 2022, StubHub has been actively working with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs to solidify its IPO listing plans. In its SEC filing, StubHub said its revenue jumped from $1.37 billion to $1.77 billion between 2023 and 2024. IPOs are back in the spotlight after a rough patch StubHub was initially planning to list on the NYSE sometime in the early summer, but it reportedly put its IPO on hold in the midst of economic uncertainty brought on by President Trumps tariff regime. At the time, a source familiar with the company cited stagnant market conditions and a lack of major consumer IPOs as two of the main reasons for the delay, according to CNBC. The fintech startup Klarna similarly paused its long-awaited IPO earlier this year. Now, though, as the market has held relatively steady despite new tariffs, both Klarna and StubHub are reentering the IPO game. Successful recent IPOs from companies including the design software startup Figma, the crypto exchange Bullish, and the stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group have put public listings back into the spotlight and stoked investors interest.
Category:
E-Commerce
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